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 296 Barkham,” Eleanor answered, indignantly. “If I am without a friend whom I can ask to testify to my respectability, it is on account of circumstances which—”

“To be sure,” exclaimed Miss Barkham; “that is the very thing we have to contend against. This establishment is completely overrun by young ladies, who think there is nothing easier than to turn their backs upon their friends and their homes, and go out into the world to become the instructresses of the rising generation. You think me very punctilious and strait-laced, I daresay, Miss Villars; but I don’t know what would become of the rising generation if somebody didn’t keep watch and ward over the doors of the school-room. Young ladies who choose to feel unhappy in the society of their parents; young ladies who are disappointed in some sentimental affection; young ladies who fancy themselves ill-used by their elder sisters; young ladies who, from the very shallowness of their own minds, cannot be contented anywhere, all come to us, and want to go out as governesses,—just for a change, they say, in the hope of finding a little employment that will divert their minds—as if they had any minds to be diverted! These are the amateur hangers-on of a very grave and respectable profession, to which hundreds of estimable and accomplished women have devoted the best and brightest years of their lives. These are the ignorant and superficial pretenders who bring their cheap and worthless wares into the market; in order to undersell the painstaking and patient teachers who have themselves learned the lessons they profess to teach. And these amateurs will continue to flourish, Miss Villars; so long as ladies, who would shudder at the idea of entrusting an expensive silk dress to an incompetent dressmaker, are willing to confide the care of their children to an instructress whose highest merit lies in the fact that she is—cheap. I do not wish to wound your feelings, Miss Villars; but I assure you I often feel sick at heart, when I see a lady who offers thirty years’ experience, and all the treasures of a mind carefully and sedulously cultivated, rejected in favour of some chit of nineteen who can play one showy fantasia, and disfigure, glass vases with scraps of painted paper; and who will accept twenty pounds a year in payment of services that are not worth five.”

Eleanor smiled at Miss Barkham’s energetic protest.

“I daresay you are often very much worried by incompetent people,” she said; “but I assure you I have made no attempt to deceive you. I don’t profess to do much, you know. I believe I can play pretty well. May I play you something?” she asked, pointing to an open pianoforte at one end of the room, a handsome grand, with all Erard’s patent improvements, on which governesses upon their promotion were in the habit of showing off.

“I have no objection to hear you play,” Miss Barkham answered; “but remember, I cannot possibly procure you a situation without either references or testimonials.”

Eleanor went to the piano, took off her gloves, and ran her fingers over the keys. She had played very little during the last few months, for in the feverish preoccupation of her mind she had been unequal to any feminine employment; too restless and unsettled to do anything but roam about the house, or sit brooding silently, with her hands lying idle in her lap.

The familiar touch of the keys filled her with a strange pleasure; she was surprised at the brilliancy of her execution, as good players often are after an interval of idleness. She played one of Beethoven’s most sparkling sonatas; and even Miss Barkham, who was perpetually listening to such performances, murmured a few words of praise.

But before Eleanor had been seated at the piano more than five minutes, a servant came into the room and presented a card to Miss Barkham, who rose from her seat with some appearance of vexation.

“Really, I scarcely know what to do about it,” she muttered to herself. “It’s almost impossible to arrange anything at such very short notice. Excuse me, Miss Villars,” she added, aloud, to Eleanor, “I am obliged to see a lady in the next room. Don’t go until I return.”

Eleanor bowed, and went on playing. She finished the sonata; and then, suddenly catching sight of her wedding ring and the thick band of gold studded with diamonds that her husband had given her on her wedding-day, she stopped to draw the two rings off her finger, and put them into her purse amongst the few sovereigns that formed her whole stock of worldly wealth.

She sighed as she did this, for it seemed like putting off her old life altogether.

“It’s better so,” she said to herself; “I know now that Gilbert must have thought me false to him from the very first. I can understand his cold reserve now, though it used to puzzle me so much. He changed almost immediately after our marriage.”

Eleanor Monckton grew very pensive as she remembered that she had been perhaps herself to blame for the altered manner, and no doubt equally altered feelings, of her husband. She had neglected her duty as a wife, absorbed in her affection as a daughter; she had sacrificed the living to the dead; and she began to think that Richard Thornton’s advice had been wiser than she had believed when she refused to listen to it. She had been wrong altogether. Classic vows of vengeance were all very well in the days when a Medea rode upon flying dragons and slaughtered her children upon principle; but a certain inspired teacher, writing a very long time after that much-to-be-regretted classic age, has declared that vengeance is the right of divinity alone, and far too terrible an attribute to be tampered with by fallible mortals, blindly hurling the bolts of Heaven against each other’s earthly heads.

She thought this, and grew very melancholy and uncomfortable, and began to fancy that her impulses had been about the worst guides that she could have chosen. She began to think that she had not acted so very wisely in running away from Tolldale Priory in the first heat of her indignation, and that she might have done better perhaps by writing a temperate letter of